BANDWAGON Shifts Focus With New Product

Mar 12, 2018 12:27PM
● By Emily Stevenson

BANDWAGON has launched a
new product, the Stadium Identity Management
Platform, which is built for professional sports organizations and college
athletic departments, to help them identify game-day fans so that a
personalized experience can be delivered.

This marks a significant
shift in BANDWAGON’s business model. It had focused on helping fans create
their best game day experience by finding better seats that tailored to what
they wanted – not just what was available on the market, said Harold Hughes,
the company’s CEO and founder. However, by focusing on how athletic departments
and sports team can optimize the fan experience, they believe they can
radically change the sporting landscape and the profit opportunities for sports
organizations.

BANDWAGON
tracks qualitative customer data for ticketed events through a proprietary
blockchain database that monitors each ticket transaction, Hughes said. Event owners can track the economics of
each ticket and stay informed of the end user who ultimately attends the event.
For example, a college may know it sold one person a season ticket, but it
doesn’t know how many of the games the person actually attends. They may sell
some of the tickets. BANDWAGON allows them to find out who that new person is
and how to advertise and communicate with them.

The company decided to make the shift
after spending its first few years analyzing the way people purchase tickets
for sporting events, he said. The more its team researched, the more they saw
the real need.

For example, BANDWAGON’s blockchain
technology can help an athletics department know that more women might be
buying tickets to a particular game and therefore to stock up on more women’s
apparel or to tweak their messaging more to women.

“Sports organizations have no idea who is
showing up in their stadiums on game day, which directly affects revenue and
attendance,” he said. “We can fix that and help them create an experience that
fans want to come back for again and again. Our platform allows sports organizations to increase revenue with a suite of data
analytics and marketing tools.”

While Hughes worked on the BANDWAGON idea
for several years, the company officially launched in the January 2016. Since
then, it has garnered investment from the Blue
Vista Ventures, Black Angel Tech Fund, and Backstage Capital and is growing
with support from the Founder Institute Incubator and the Capital Factory
Accelerator.

“By
matching the right fans with the right services, teams are able to offer an
unmatched live event experience,” Hughes said.